• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, July 11, 2017

The ad world is buzzing about the Q1 media spending report released yesterday by MediaRadar. There was bad news on several fronts.

Print advertising? Down.

Digital advertising? Down.

Programmatic advertising? Down.

But there was good news in at least two areas. Native advertising grew by 74% in Q1, meaning that 74% of native advertisers increased their spend, year over year.

Email rose by 28%.

That may not sound like much, but it’s a solid showing, compared to almost everything else. The only other medium that grew was mobile—by 8%. Direct and video were flat.

How does MediaRadar explain email’s performance?

“Despite crowded inboxes and the rise of push messaging and social media, email advertising is still one of the best ways to reach a targeted opt-in audience," said Todd Krizelman, CEO of MediaRadar, in an email..... "Consumers leverage email newsletters toreceive a quick snapshot of the subject matter. An example of this would be Quartz's daily brief.  The metrics for email marketing are also well-known and trusted.  In today’s world where online ad fraud is large, email continues to enjoy the confidence of marketers.”

The study notes that advertising is being shaped by two factors this year: 

• Audience impact 
• Concerns about brand safety

Advertisers are also looking for ad formats with higher CPM. The number of firms that used email grew from 3112 to 3968 in Q1 year-over-year. In contrast, the native ad field now has 5,603, compared with 3227 in 2016. The mobile advertiser roster increased from 11,772 in 2016 to 12,692 in 2017.

According to the study, 3,076 advertisers bought native advertising in March of this year, compared to 1,259 in March 2015.

The top five native advertisers, in terms of number placements, are: Secco Squared (83,220), Answers Corp. (68,042), Nextadvertisers (53,127), Potential Investments (52,734) and JPMorganChase (49,049).

MediaRadar is a cloud-based platform using data science to provide advertising sales intelligence.

For this report, the MediaRadar platform analyzed online and print ads, spend and formats in all of 2016 through Q1 2017, the company said. This “snapshot” is based on analysis of 266,324 advertisers.